Thu May 29, 2008 at 13:45

Searching for John McCain is a massive, online activism campaign designed to make at least ten million non-partisan, poll-tested, on-message voter contacts that reveal the damning truth about John McCain entirely through mainstream news reports and McCain's own words. Through mass blogger participation and the use of embedded hyperlinks, Searching for John McCain will connect millions of curious, low-information swing voters to negative, mainstream news articles about John McCain without 99% of those voters even knowing that Searching for John McCain exists. It is the more sophisticated, and hopefully more effective, 2.0 version of the Googlebomb the Elections campaign which, with only $1,500 and three days of work, reached 6% of the electorate in 47 swing congressional districts during the final two weeks of the 2006 mid-term elections.

You can participate if you have a website of your own, if you make comments on other websites, or even if you are a registered user on a community website. It is quick. It is easy. It is free. And it is very, very effective. If it is done correctly, and if enough people participate, this campaign alone should cost John McCain 1% of the vote in November.

To learn how to participate, and to learn how it will work, read on into the extended entry.

Searching for John McCainWhatThe utilization of simultaneous, widespread embedded hyperlinks in order to connect voters looking for information on John McCain to nine revealing, important news articles on John McCain.

WhyAccording to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the number one way that voters use the Internet for political action is to search for information on candidates. In 2004, 34 million Americans used the Internet for this purpose. In 2008, that number will increase significantly, possibly to 50 million or more, with tens of millions looking for information on John McCain. As these voters are looking for information on John McCain, our actions will direct them toward nine articles in particular. Voters are looking for information on John McCain, and we are giving it to them.

These nine articles were not chosen lightly. Analyzing and interpreting polling has long been one of the specialties as a blogger, and I have spent the last three months culling through mountains of available polling on John McCain in order to find the top attacks. All nine of these articles directly correspond to messaging on John McCain that, according to my research, effectively raises doubts about McCain among more than 60% of swing voters.

Additionally, six of these nine articles are from news organizations that already boast top twenty-five Google search rankings for either "John McCain" or "McCain." As such, in order for those six articles to appear in the top twenty Google searches on either John McCain or McCain, we only have to optimize each of those articles relative to other articles from that news organization. That is a very simple, low-hanging fruit sort of task that can be accomplished in only a matter of days.

Further, this messaging is presented by either John McCain himself, or by a non-partisan news organization (or, in most cases, both). As such, the messaging will not be, or be seen as, a partisan attack, making it all the more effective. Personally, I also like that when the inevitable media and conservative outcry against this action kicks in, we can just say that these are all McCain's own words, and all articles produced by national news organizations. Considering that Michelle Malkin claimed Google should sue me over the Googlebomb campaign two years ago, that her readers issued dozens of death threats against me, and that every single TV news organization contacted me about the campaign two years ago, I really like this aspect of the campaign.

Finally, all of these articles have "McCain" in the title of the article, and most have "McCain" in the URL for the article, making them easier to optimize on Google.

The ArticlesHere are the nine articles:

1--John McCain Votes to Filibuster Minimum Wage HikeAOL News is highly ranked on John McCain, and the minimum wage increase was incredibly popular.

2--McCain housing policy shaped by lobbyistThis article emphasizes how corporate special interests have formed McCain's economic policy. If it becomes the top ranked MSNBC article, it will appear in the top ten searches for McCain nationwide.

3--Bush, McCain plug Social SecuritySeniors are going to be the key swing vote in this election, and they hate Bush's plan to privatize Social Security. This is the best polling message against McCain of all, which isn't surprising since our victory on Social Security is how began to turn the tide against Republicans and conservatives three years ago. The headline alone ties McCain to Bush, and this article already ranks very high on searches for McCain Social Security.

4--McCain blasts Obama's and Clinton's attacks on NAFTAThis is a great article because it not only ties McCain to NAFTA, which is quite unpopular, but it also draws a contrast between McCain and Democrats on the issue. The LA Times is also in the top twenty searches for John McCain.

5--McCain in NH: Would Be "Fine" To Keep Troops in Iraq for "A Hundred Years"McCain's "100 years" statement ha damaged him already, and this article has already been significantly optimized on Google. While Mother Jones is not an ideal news source, it is the top article for this quote, and appears in the top thirty searches for John McCain already.

6--McCain: Bush right to veto kids health insurance expansionThis is my personal favorite. The headline just makes McCain look like an asshole, and ties him to Bush. Who is opposed to health insurance for kids? CNN also is in the top ten searches for McCain and John McCain A lot of people will see this one.

7--Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain oppositionWhile I am not thrilled about using Salon, since it isn't as well known, and since there is an advertising wall that hides the story, the title is damaging enough. McCain's opposition to the GI Bill really hurts him, and tying him to Bush is just as bad. This title does both in a clear, straightforward manner.

8--McCain says overturn the law that legalized abortionPretty straightforward, and extremely important. More than half of all women voters think that McCain is pro-choice. This will quickly change their minds.

9--McCain Defends Bush's Iraq StrategyThe classic McCain SEO, that still appears in top thirty searches for McCain and John McCain. It is also proof positive that this campaign will work, because it appears as the second CBS news article, but still on the front page in Google searches just below the CBS election center information on John McCain. That is all we need to do to get it on the front page of searches about McCain--optimize it against other CBS articles. Also, even though this SEO campaign was abandoned fifteen months ago, it still ranks in the top forty in McCain searches. If a fifteen month old campaign is still that effective, imagine what we can do with enough participation in this campaign.

Even if people searching for information on McCain don't click through to read each of these articles, the titles alone collectively paint a pretty terrifying picture of McCain. Further, their wide subject range will create a trickle down effect for all kinds of searches on McCain. When people look for specific information on McCain's issue positions, these articles will appear in the top ten for many, if not most, of those searches.

ActionAnd now the important part. Here is how you can participate in the campaign:

1. Blogroll John McCain: If you have a website of your own, create a blogroll link for either McCain or John McCain, that links to one of these nine articles.

2. Sign John McCain: Put an embedded John McCain link to one of these nine article in your signature line on all community websites where you are registered. Choose any one of the nine that you like.

3. Comment on John McCain: Whenever you write the words John McCain or McCain online, makes sure to do so with an embedded link to one of these nine article. Choose any of the nine that you link.

And that is all you have to do. If we can get only a few hundred bloggers to participate, we should be able to put six of these nine articles in the top twenty search results for John McCain and McCain before the end of next week. Over time, all nine should appear in the top twenty, and three or four will appear in the top ten. In the end, this should result in several million voter contacts that provide important information on John McCain. The contacts will all be effective, poll tested, non-partisan, and in line with progressive messaging in this election. They will also be educational, as the people who find these articles might forward them to friends and co-workers, or bring them up in conversations. The ripple effect should be quite powerful.

So, please, optimize John McCain today. Put John McCain in your blogroll. Put John McCain in your signature line. Link to John McCain whenever you type his name on a website. This is a quick and powerful action you can take, and it will help us win this election. There isn't another action you can take this election that will have anywhere near as a high a return for the amount of effort it takes to execute. Millions of truly effective voter contacts just by creating embedded hyperlinks on John McCain or McCain. Let's do this. Let's make a difference. Let's win this election. Let's search for John McCain.

UPDATE: The first article about the recession being "psychological" has been replaced due to an oversight on my part. It now optimizes John McCain on the minimum wage. Really, I think this is an improvement. Please update your links if you used the first one originally.

Soapblox is built on an SQL backbone. How difficult would it be to write a program that could create these McCain links in your previous posts? It is a little more complicated than a search and replace (because you have to see if the "McCain" in question already is part of a hyperlink), but I think that it would be very doable. The question is the extent to which you have control over your SQL database. As an admin at Prairie State Blue I looked into this both during the original 2006 googlebomb campaign and when the Bush Dog campaign kicked off, but did have sufficient access to our SQL database to do it... But we were small fish compared to you.

Two secondary points are how helpful these retroactive links would be (though I am pretty sure that they are as useful as current links) and if there are pragmatic concerns for inserting these links retroactively. (Like there are for making corrections to stories without strikethroughs...) Anyway, something to think about.

But my understanding is that as links fall off of the front page, and stop getting the volume of traffic, they also lose effectiveness. This means that the most valuable links are ones that are in (or in the comments of?) articles that are currently on the front page, or ones that remain on the front page, like those in the blogroll. I could be wrong though, anyone know the details?

Also, anyone reading old posts might get pretty confused if those posts had unrelated links embedded into them.

Those are the concerns I can think of. Still, may be a good idea anyway.

Front page stuff tends to have more of an impact short-term, but past posts depend on how often people come across them. Big head/small tail sort of thing. There might be a post from a year ago that people are still finding and reading that's more relevant than one written this afternoon that's up on the front page for 20 hours.

You paste in your comment, and click "Google Bomb Your Text" and Hyperlinks all the "McCain"'s found in the text with the links Chris has provided. If there are more than 9, it repeats links. Otherwise it picks a random link to start with and rotates through them all.

Sorry for not explaining better: The tool that Jimmy Crackcorn has created does the same thing as entering the links manually as you say. But what we are doing is not bombing. What we are doing is reinforcing articles that clearly describe how John McCain would actually govern and countering the myths about him being a "maverick". We are not trying to fool anyone or link John McCain's name to something irrelevant (like "idiot"). Instead, we are just linking his actual policies to his name.

- Find the first instance of John McCain and note the character position.
- Seek backwards from that position for the first instance of this string: a>
- If the character immediately preceding that instance is a slash, we are not inside of an existing hyperlink and it's safe to wrap John McCain with one of the links.
- If the preceding character is a <, we are inside of an existing hyperlink and nothing should be changed.
- Move on to the next instance of John McCain and repeat.

I think, and I'm guesstimating/generalizing wildly here, that they've got a different email use culture. They obviously keep using those emails because they work, their target audience sends them to each other, but when was the last time you forwarded something like that to a friend or had them forward something like that to you? Or when were you last part of a joke email chain?

My mom got the 'Obama is a Muslim and anti-christ' email from a friend, who had forwarded it to about 20 people. My mom (about 70) uses the internet almost strictly for email and shopping. I doubt she would have the knowledge to search the internet to find out that the email was bs. I fully informed her. There are probably a large chunk of older internet users, who either don't know what they can do on the net, or are just too used to getting their news from the paper or friends.

John McCain sees a very long war in Iraq:
"McCain in NH: Would Be 'Fine' To Keep Troops in Iraq for 'A Hundred Years' ," by David Corn, Mother Jones Magazine, January 3, 2008.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/01/6735_mccain_in_nh_wo.html

embed John McCain in the hyperlink, not the attack. A lot more people are looking for John McCain than NAFTA. Also, what you are doing is technically a Googlebomb, not SEO, and I it is best to avoid that.

Not really sure how to embed a link here. Might wanna update diary with an explanation for the idiots among us. Find Profile, change signature, then how to embed a link. I think I've got this right, but am leery of clicking around the site for help, because with six old Youtube videos open on every page, the site lag is tremendously frustrating.

but on dKos, where I just changed my sig, the change is apparently retroactive. I went back to comments of mine from 2006 and found the new sig there.

I dunno if Google picks up on those, but it brought to mind those occasional dKos diaries in which someone (jotter?) lists the most prolific commenters. If memory serves, there are 50 or 60 members of dkos who comment well in excess of a thousand times a month.

Wondering if digging up those diaries and sending emails alerting them to this initiative might not be worthwhile. Happy to get on that if you'd like--and if it'd help.

That sounds like a really good idea. I use my authority as a random commenter to say: go for it!

I'm not sure really old comments have the same power as ones currently on the front page... but even so, having someone who comments a thousand times a month involved is very valuable, even ignoring their past comments.

I've been sitting here thinking about how I don't have a blog...
(0.00 / 0)

But of course, you're totally right about facebook. I wonder if facebook or myspace groups about this would help spread the word among the millions of college students who support Obama but aren't submersed in the world of political blogs.

To what degree do we want to keep this low-profile? I sort of think any damage done by raising the profile of the project will be more than made up for by increased participation.

I'm afraid this will not work. You can read my comment way down the thread about it, but I think links coming off of facebook will not be counted by google towards increasing the pagerank of the articles.

I like these ideas, and Google bombing has been successful in the past, but it works less and less with each turn. Maybe it will work this time; next time probably less so.

Google employs thousands of engineers whose only job is to make sure search results are not distorted by personal interests. It is only a matter of time before they discover the essence of this kind of action and begin to weight results for it.

They'd have to abandon the core of their search ranking algorythm. Perhaps they can make it more difficult, but without a new search paradigm it will still factor in.

And when that new paradigm comes out, we'll figure out how to optimize it.

Their previous efforts were to fight back against "french military victories" and "miserable failure" joke type googlebombs. These links are relevant to the link text, factual and so forth. It would be very difficult to filter this stuff out.

I agree with you that Google won't take the time or effort to filter out relevant links when their engineers have to spend so much time on things that affect Google income like PPC clickfraud and scraper sites that are out to make quick bucks on AdSense income. Chris Bowers is likely not on their radar.

And, as I noted, we already have a successful test case. the CBS article has been in the top searches for McCain for over a year. Trust me, this works, because we follow their process exactly. It isn't a trick--we are directing embedded links on John McCain to info about John McCain. This is how Google works.

Google changed their algorithm to weed out links to pages that don't mention the subject of the search. In the past you could get people to link the word "idiot" to a page on Bush and Google would pick it up. Today, it would notice the page on Bush doesn't really use the word idiot. I think their weeding may be a bit more sophisticated than that, but not by a lot.

In retrospect, it's always been about targeting of pertinent information. A googlebomb proactively changes the way things are related to each other (e.g. George Bush and idiot) whereas this simply reinforces.

Hard to say if that's the best course. If they're going to write an article anyway, or do a story, they'll for sure get some right wing nut to ramble about how you're a dirty trickster and whatnot. If you refuse comment, will you look like a shady character?

Might be best to just offer the up front emphatic defence of this activity. Since you went through this last time and I imagine you know better.

I do agree trying to keep this below the radar is probably the best way though. Then again, news stories on this will cause people to do google searches on McCain and maybe they'll be surprised at what they find. So there'd be a silver lining to coverage of this.

Drop the "googlebomb" line. This isn't googlebombing. That is when you link to an article with content different than the embedded text. Since we are linking John McCain to articles on John McCain, it isn't googlebombing.

It's a good story, but linking to an Iranian news service as a source seems to expose the entire effort to an unnecessary point of criticism. I realize wingnuts will scream regardless, but I'm not sure attaching a giant red flag to the project is the best idea when trying to appeal to those undecided about McCain.

The link was to a page on an Iranian site, but the actual source of the quote was Fox News, so it would be ridiculous to claim it was Iranian propaganda (not that being ridiculous has ever stopped wingnuts). Still I'm glad it's been removed from the list, since it could have been an distraction.

Jack Nicholson's got the obvious line, of course. But the big one for me derives from the simple juxtaposition: Obama being attacked with emailed lies about being a Muslim meets John McCain being attacked with hyperlinks to stories the M$M writes, but then ignores.

This, of course, brings to mind Harry Truman's old bargain: "We'll stop telling the truth about Republicans if they stop lying about us."

It's also the most effective response yet to the phenomena that Project Censored was founded to deal with--the story that's written, but not picked up and developed, despite its obvious extreme importance. (The way that Watergate was under-reported before the 1972 election was the original inspiration.)

Today's the day our paper has its editorial meeting for our next issue, and one of the stories I've pitched is to write about this campaign. It's sad that an old fogey like me is the most net-savvy person on staff, or else it would be a no-brainer. We'll just have to see.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

I was just wondering if any of the information in there would be useful to you? Most of his criticisms seem very very silly, but I was confused by the "no-follow tag" business. Is that a problem on this site? Will it be on other sites?

I fear that Facebook and other social networking sites will not work. Apparently, for reasons I don't understand (but maybe having to do with spam and projects like this), some sites add "nofollow tags" to any outgoing links, which alert "spiders" like google's pagerank program not to count those links. It appears, though someone who knows about this should seriously weigh in, that at least Facebook, and probably Myspace, too, have nofollow tags on all outgoing links.

Many blogs (all wordpress blogs, for example) automatically add the nofollow tags to commenter links. I think that Open Left and MYDD do not, but I don't know about DKos, which I think it is really important to look into.

In terms of whether or not Google is smart enough to figure out what we're doing, here, I think time will tell. Most of these techniques are designed by them to keep people from boosting the rankings of for-profit sites, but they obviously effect this as well.

It seems to me that one thing that will not be effected no matter what (unless google were simply to decide to fix the rankings of the chosen articles) is the addition of the links to blogrolls. Even blogs that add the nofollow tag to commenters do not add it to the front page, I think.

First of all, Facebook and MySpace are also great ways for getting the word out. I posted about it in the One Million Strong for Barack Facebook group ... if anybody's got a strong MySpace presence, please do the same!

As for whether links from there will help ... it's true that they typically aren't factored into Google rankings. However, they may help expose people to the articles in a more viral way: if you have some friends who are low-information voters and they happen to see the links in your feed. This works particularly well with videos, which are easy to share (especially using iLike on Facebook); it's hard to know for sure, but we got some data. Not sure it makes sense for this first attempt, but certainly something to keep in mind for future iterations.